Omnicom Media Group and Salesforce Will Build Social Marketing Tools

Global deal maintains Benioff's hot streak

Omnicom Media Group will employ Salesforce's Marketing Cloud for its social media-based marketing and advertising efforts across its global agency network, the companies are announcing today.

Omnicom's two-and-a-half-year-old analytics division, Annalect, will utilize Salesforce's social technologies to build campaign-informing tools for the New York group's 5,000 clients in 100 countries, including those served by its OMD Worldwide, PHD Worldwide and Resolution Media properties. What's more, Omnicom and Salesforce will team up to create social media command centers to showcase those tools in the agency network's London, San Francisco, Chicago and New York locations.

The development points to a continuously evolving social media marketing space. And as it specifically pertains to Salesforce.com, it appears to be a testament to CEO Marc Benioff's seemingly shrewd investments in social media in recent years, particularly the purchase of Buddy Media in May 2012 and Radian6 in March 2011. ExactTarget's software services, picked up by Salesforce on June 4 for $2.5 billion, will almost certainly influence the digital outcomes of the new Omnicom partnership as well.

"[We] share a common vision of helping our customers build connections in new ways via cloud, social and mobile technologies," Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Annalect, said in a statement. "Our ambition is to build towards a completed integrated marketing workflow grounded in social."

Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, added, "[Our] leading technologies will make it easy for Omnicom Media Group agencies to effectively scale social listening, publishing and advertising for their thousands of clients globally."

Salesforce is set to announce the deal at New York's Radio City Music Hall this morning. The marketing ramifications of the recent ExactTarget purchase will also likely be a hot topic.